Installing updates on any operating system can be a time consuming process. Part of the philosophy of a free and open source operating system is the commitment to keeping your system updated with the latest security patches and feature updates. With Fedora systems, I often see 50-100 MB worth of updates per week. Even on a broadband connection, downloading updates can still take time.
To help decrease the size of update download, you can install the Presto plug-in for yum. With the Presto plug-in, yum now has the ability to download only the changes in the packages, called deltarpms, and not the complete package. Using yum-presto can reduce the total download size anywhere from 60 to 80 %.
Installation
Installing the Presto plug-in for yum is done with the line below.
sudo yum install yum-presto
After the plug-in installs, update your system with
sudo yum update
I have had a very good experience with yum-presto. Recently I performed a new installation of Fedora on a system and without the Presto plug-in, I would have had to download around 400+ MB of updates. With Presto, I was able to download all updates in only 112 MB.
Have you heard of the Presto plug-in for yum? What other yum plug-ins have you used? Let us know in the comments below.